Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (29 page)

Rigorous investigative journalism of the sort that arose in the 1960s and 1970s would probably have weakened McCarthy. But it is ahistorical to expect such journalism to have existed in the 1950s. Reporters were ill paid in those days and lacked the resources in staff or money to dig deeply into McCarthy's charges. The Washington press corps was small. It was not until later, amid growing anger about a "cover-up" during the Vietnam War, that significant numbers of reporters became obstreperous in challenging "official" sources. Only in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, did this attitude become widespread among political journalists in the United States.

Others analysts of McCarthyism in retrospect have concluded pessimistically that it demonstrated the susceptibility of the American people to demagogic appeals. There is evidence for such gloomy indictments of democracy, but it is limited. McCarthy's attacks on the eastern Establishment indeed set off responsive echoes, especially among conservative Republicans. Like McCarthy, some of these Republicans literally loathed Acheson. "I look at that fellow," Republican Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska said. "I watch his smart aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism, everlasting New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, Get Out! Get Out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years."
¹⁰²
The managing editor of McCarthy's hometown Appleton newspaper explained, "We don't want a group of New Yorkers and Easterners to tell us whom we are going to send to the Senate. That is our business, and it is none of theirs."
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The anger that underlay such comments suggested that regional resentments still burned strongly indeed in the United States.

McCarthy's rampage also appealed to people who nursed hostility toward elites, especially in government. This feeling reflected enduring class, ethnic, and religious tensions, which periodically broke into the open amid more superficial manifestations of popular consensus in the United States. Working-class people who had struggled to get ahead after the war resented it when "educated" liberals appeared to look down on their accomplishments and their styles of life. A number of east-European-Americans, moreover, responded warmly to McCarthy's claims that Democrats had "sold out" the masses behind the iron curtain. Many Catholics, hating "Godless" Communism, also seemed to support his crusades. McCarthy, like Alabama's George Wallace in the 1960s, often appealed to all these groups by highlighting the influence of those who were wealthier and more influential. The sociologist Jonathan Rieder observes correctly that McCarthy advanced a "rhetoric of plebian contempt for things effete" and "hurried the movement of the Right toward a conservatism conspicuously more majoritarian than previously."
¹⁰⁴

The phenomenon of McCarthyism, however, should not be seen as a broadly popular movement or as one that was essentially working-class, Catholic, or ethnic in membership. Millions of such people, after all, still tended to vote Democratic and to reject McCarthyite visions of the world. Rather, three things may be said about McCarthyism. First, it derived much of its staying power from the frightened and calculating behavior of political elites and of allied interest groups, not from the people at large. Second, many partisan Republicans took the lead in backing their reckless colleague. Third, McCarthyism rode on anti-Communist fears—again, strongest among elites—that were already cresting in early 1950.
¹⁰⁵

The role of political leaders was indeed important. Those who had to run for office were often very cautious. Most of them did not like McCarthy personally and were appalled by his behavior. But the ferocity of his attacks—and his apparent invulnerability to criticism—shook many of them. They were reluctant to stand up and be counted against him, especially in an election year. Some of the most fearful office-holders came from working-class and Catholic districts. Representative John F. Kennedy, whose father was a friend and a patron of McCarthy, was among them. "McCarthy may have something," Jack said. Neither as a representative nor (after 1952) as a senator did Kennedy speak out against McCarthy.

Many Republican senators eagerly supported their colleague. For some this was only natural: they had been making similar charges for some time. On the same day that McCarthy spoke in Wheeling, Homer Capehart of Indiana rose in the Senate to ask, "How much more are we going to have to take? Fuchs and Acheson and Hiss and hydrogen bombs threatening outside and New Dealism eating away at the vitals of the nation! In the name of Heaven, is this the best America can do?"
¹⁰⁶
Then and later Capehart, Jenner, and other conservatives gladly reinforced their Wisconsin colleague. When Truman nominated Marshall to be his Secretary of Defense following the outbreak of war in Korea, Jenner denounced the former Secretary of State as a "living lie" and as a "front man for traitors."
¹⁰⁷

Had these Republicans been the only ones to stand up for McCarthy, he might have had a more difficult time of it in the Senate—and with the press and the American people. But McCarthy also got the backing of Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," the most influential GOP politician on Capitol Hill. Taft was not close to McCarthy—or to zealots like Jenner—and he did not think that subversion threatened the nation. But Taft, like most of his Republican colleagues on the Hill, strongly opposed the drift of American foreign and domestic policies since the New Deal. He very much disliked Acheson, one of McCarthy's favorite targets. Shocked by the unexpected victory of the Democrats in 1948, Taft longed to embarrass and defeat them. He also hoped to win the GOP presidential nomination in 1952. And he knew that anti-Communism was politically popular. For all these reasons Taft refused to denounce his colleague. McCarthy, he said, should "keep talking and if one case doesn't work out, he should proceed with another one." This was an irresponsible position that reflected the especially harsh partisan atmosphere of the times.
¹⁰⁸

Taft, although influential among his Republican colleagues, could not silence all senatorial opposition to McCarthy. In June 1950, seven liberal Republican senators led by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine issued a "Declaration of Conscience" that complained about the Senate being used as a "publicity platform for irresponsible sensationalism." Moreover, it is doubtful that Taft—or anyone else—could have silenced McCarthy, who reveled in the attention that he aroused. Still, the support of McCarthy by the GOP, especially in the Senate, did much to lend a veneer of political respectability to McCarthyism from 1950 through 1954.

To highlight the role of elites in the support of McCarthy is to challenge the notion that he aroused great popular support. Polls, indeed, showed that he did not; only once, in 1954, did more than 50 percent of Americans say that they backed him. Still, office-holders knew that it paid off politically to be loudly and insistently against Communism, especially following the alarms that rang through American society in late 1949 and early 1950: the Soviets had the Bomb, the Reds had China, Hiss had lied, Fuchs was a spy. These were widely known, profoundly alarming events that were already promoting Red Scares—in unions, in schools and universities, in Hollywood, within the Truman administration itself—well before McCarthy made his headlines. It was in this highly charged Cold War atmosphere of fear and suspicion that McCarthy and his well-placed allies were able to run amok.

L
OOKING BACK ON
M
C
C
ARTHYISM
and the postwar Red Scare, George Kennan came close to despair:

What the phenomenon of McCarthyism did . . . was to implant in my consciousness a lasting doubt as to the adequacy of our political system. . . . A political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another. I could never recapture, after these experiences of the 1940s and 1950s, quite the same faith in the American system of government and in traditional American outlooks that I had had, despite all the discouragements of official life, before that time.
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Other observers have been a little less pessimistic than Kennan, who had always doubted the capacity of democracy to cope with crisis. Indeed, McCarthy ultimately overreached himself and crashed into popular disgrace in 1954.
¹¹⁰
Thereafter the Red Scares that had sullied American politics and society abated. Still, Kennan had good cause for pessimism, for McCarthy's fall occurred more than four years after he started his rampage at Wheeling, more than five years after anti-Communists moved to cleanse the unions, schools, and colleges, more than six after government started using the Smith Act to put Communist leaders in jail, and more than seven after Truman tightened loyalty progams and HUAC assailed Hollywood. During these eight years it is estimated that a few thousand people lost their jobs, a few hundred were jailed, more than 150 were deported, and two, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (Communists who were arrested in 1950 following further revelations about the Fuchs case) were executed in June 1953 on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage.
¹¹¹

Kennan, moreover, was correct in lamenting two broader results of the postwar Red Scare. First, it constricted public life and speech. Before the Red Scare peaked, many public figures had been both liberal and anti-Communist, without worrying much about being labeled as a "pink" or being accused of "disloyalty." During the Red Scare, however, liberal politicians and intellectuals became vulnerable to the charge of being "soft" on Communism—or worse. Some muted their liberalism, especially in the 1950s. As Diana Trilling said many years later, "McCarthy not only deformed our political thinking, he . . . polluted our political rhetoric. [He] had a lasting effect in polarizing the intellectuals of this country and in entrenching anti-anti-communism as the position of choice among people of good will."
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Second, McCarthyism helped to tie a straitjacket of sorts on America's foreign and defense policies. How much the coat confined remains disputed. Some of the major policy initiatives of 1949–50—militarization of NATO, non-recognition of the People's Republic, development of the Super, support for NSC-68—would have occurred anyway, as alarmed reactions of government officials confronted with a foe like Stalin, especially after the Soviets got the Bomb in 1949. The strait jacket was nonetheless tight. The Red Scare helped to turn understandable concerns about Communist intentions into demands for the toughest kinds of responses. Could the arms race, both nuclear and otherwise, have been less dangerous than it became after 1950? Could the United States have cautiously built bridges to the People's Republic, thereby driving a wedge between the Soviet Union and China? These and other options would have been politically perilous after the Cold War hardened in 1946, but the Red Scare made certain that they were not seriously explored. Especially after 1949, politicians, scholars, and writers who dared suggest initiatives that seemed "naive" or "soft" on Communism were even more than before at risk of losing office or reputation.

The Red Scare, finally, dampened a little the otherwise upbeat, can-do mood of American life at the time. "A little" is the way to put it, for postwar prosperity increased even more rapidly from 1950 through 1954 than it had between 1945 and 1948. The rising personal expectations of millions of Americans—most of them unaffected by the Red Scare—grew ever more grand. From this perspective the Red Scare may be seen as a shameful saga of overreaction and intolerance; it left scars. Still, in the longer run it did not stop the majority of Americans from their expectant pursuit of the Good Life.

8
Korea

There are few monuments in the United States commemorating the Korean War. By the 1960s most Americans had tried to put the war out of memory. Many who later saw "M*A*S*H," the popular TV series about an American medical unit in Korea, assumed that the episodes were set in Vietnam. Other Americans recalled the war as a relatively insignificant "police action," as Truman called it on one occasion. One book on the conflict is entitled
The Forgotten War
.
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This national amnesia is understandable, for the Korean War, which pitted American and allied troops against North Korea and China between June 1950 and July 1953, seems inconsequential compared to the two world wars and to America's ten-year battle in Vietnam. At the time, however, the Korean conflict loomed large both at home and abroad. On several occasions during the war Truman and his advisers feared that it might escalate into World War III. Determined to stem the tide, as they saw it, of worldwide Communism, they briefly considered using nuclear weapons. Although they prevented the conquest of South Korea, they did not achieve a wider objective—reunifying the peninsula under non-Communist control—that they undertook in the fall of 1950. The war had lasting diplomatic, economic, and domestic consequences. Far from an insigificant little police action, it was a brutal, bloody conflict that devastated Korea and inflicted nearly 4 million casualties (dead, wounded, and missing), more than half of whom were civilians. It left 33,629 Americans dead from battle and 103,284 wounded.
²

T
HE
K
OREAN CONFLICT
was rooted in World War II. When the Second World War ended in August 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union (having entered the fight against Japan at the last minute) assumed responsibility for the surrender of enemy forces on the Korean peninsula, a largely mountainous, mineral-rich land that Japan had annexed and ruled brutally since 1910. Pentagon officials looked hurriedly at the map and decided on the 38th parallel as a line to divide the country for occupation purposes—the USSR in the North, the United States in the South—until it could be reunited in the future. This was a midway line roughly 300 miles south of the Yalu River, which formed much of Korea's northern border with Manchuria, and 300 miles north of the southernmost areas of the coast, which jutted into the Sea of Japan toward the southwest portions of Japan. About 10 million Koreans lived in each half of the country, with most of the industry in the North and much of the agriculture in the South.
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The Cold War quickly dashed hopes for the reunification and independence of Korea. Instead, the 38th parallel became a frontier that separated two hostile regimes. Kim II Sung, a charismatic young Communist, took over control in the North; Syngman Rhee, an American-educated anti-Communist, gathered the reins of power in the South. In 1948 the regions became separate regimes: the People's Democratic Republic in the North and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South. Kim ran a tyrannical regime; opponents were commonly executed without trial. Rhee's was slightly less autocratic but equally bent on reunification by conquest. Fighting between partisans of both sides rent the unhappy peninsula between 1945 and 1950, killing perhaps 100,000 people. When North Korean troops invaded the South on the night of June 25 (June 24 United States time), they greatly widened a conflict that had long taxed the patience of the occupying powers in both areas.
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What decided the North Koreans on attack remains debated more than forty years later. At the time American high officials, convinced that Kim was a pawn of Moscow, thought that Stalin had masterminded the invasion. Although the Soviets had removed their own troops from the area in 1949, they had continued to give North Korea substantial military assistance in early 1950, including T-34 tanks, which were devastating offensive weapons. America's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Alan Kirk, cabled home on June 25 that the attack represented a "clear-cut Soviet challenge which . . . US should answer firmly and swiftly as it constitutes direct threat [to] our leadership of free world against Soviet Communist imperialism."
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Critics of American policy in Korea—then and later—add that the attack took place because the Soviets thought that the United States would not defend the South. Kim had reason for such optimism in 1950. American troops had been pulled out of South Korea in June 1949, and Truman refused to commit the United States to a security pact with Rhee or to support his urgent and angry requests for better arms. Like his top advisers, the President worried about Rhee's own aggressive designs. Truman administration officials also remained staunch Europe-firsters; committing major military resources to Korea, they thought, would weaken defenses in the West. For these reasons, Truman withheld substantial military aid from South Korea.

Stalin and Kim may have paid special attention to Dean Acheson's "defense perimeter" speech in January 1950. In this widely noted address the Secretary of State omitted South Korea from areas that the United States would automatically defend against aggression. Those who carefully read the speech perceived that Acheson was deliberately murky in certain passages, holding out the possibility that unspecified places (such as Korea) might expect American help—if they could not defend themselves—from "the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations."
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Still, it was unwise of Acheson to lay out publicly what the United States was likely to do in the world; it would have been better to keep people guessing. In doing so he made it clear that defense of South Korea was a low-priority item in the United States.

It now seems that American leaders misread Stalin's role in the invasion. To be sure, Soviet military assistance made such an attack possible. Indeed, the Soviets drew up the plan of attack once it had been decided to move. But the initiative for the invasion came from Kim, who appears to have thought that an invasion would touch off a revolution against Rhee's autocratic rule in the South. After resisting Kim's appeals, Stalin gave his assent to the attack, apparently believing that the fighting would be brief and that the United States would not intervene.
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The war, in short, was as much a dramatic extension of the civil conflict in Korea as it was a deliberate provocation from the Kremlin. Still, it is highly improbable that Kim would have acted without Soviet approval, and American leaders were therefore correct at the time to heap a good deal of the blame on Moscow. Then and throughout the war they were deeply worried that the USSR had fomented the fighting so as to tie up American forces in Korea, thereby opening western Europe to Communist advances.
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Whatever the sources of North Korea's decision, it was clear that Kim and Stalin had badly misjudged the situation. Although some South Koreans supported the invaders, most did not. The South Korean army, while badly outgunned, remained loyal to Rhee. And the United States confounded enemy expectations by deciding to help the South Koreans. Kim's misjudgment, based at least in part on the irresolute signals of the Truman administration, was one of the most portentous in the history of the Cold War.

T
HE
N
ORTH
K
OREAN ONSLAUGHT
in the darkness of June 25 was a well-organized, smashing offensive spearheaded by 150 of the Soviet T-34 tanks, ROK rockets from bazookas bounced harmlessly off the tanks. Estimates were that some 90,000 well-trained, well-camouflaged North Korean troops took part in the assault. Many were battle-hardened, having served as "volunteers" for Mao in the Chinese civil war. They overwhelmed the ill-equipped ROK forces, some of whom had to rush back from furlough. About all that the defenders could do was stand and resist, fall back, resist a little more, and fall back again. Within a few days the North Koreans overran Seoul, the South Korean capital, smashed down the peninsula, and seemed destined to push ROK forces into the sea.

Truman received news of the invasion at 9:30
P.M.
June 24 at home in Independence, where he had gone for a weekend visit with his family. Acheson, telephoning the bad news, told him that he had already asked the UN Security Council to call for an end to the fighting and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. The next day, a Sunday, Truman flew back to Washington and went straight to Blair House, where he was living while the White House across the street was undergoing major renovations. By then the Security Council had already approved the American-sponsored resolution, 9–0. But the North Koreans paid no attention and smashed ahead to the south. Top military and diplomatic officials joined the President for dinner at Blair House and for the first of many tense meetings that Truman convened there over the next few days. The key players included Acheson, Dean Rusk, who was Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Omar Bradley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the service chiefs, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and other officials from the executive branch. No member of Congress was invited.
⁹

From the start all these men favored taking a strong stand against North Korean aggression. Their motives varied a little. A few worried that Communist control of South Korean air bases would pose a greater threat to the security of Japan, which the United States was building up as a bastion of capitalism in Asia. But most of those at the meeting were not much concerned about Japan, and they cared little for South Korea in itself. They worried instead that the North Korean invasion, like Nazi moves in the 1930s, brazenly challenged the will and the credibility of the "Free World." If the United States pursued appeasement, Armageddon was at hand.
¹⁰
Truman told an aide that "Korea is the Greece of the Far East. If we are tough enough now, if we stand up to them like we did in Greece three years ago, they won't take any next steps. . . . There's no telling what they'll do, if we don't put up a fight right now."
¹¹

Despite such talk, Truman and his advisers at first hoped that the North Koreans could be stopped without having to involve the United States in ground combat. This hope reflected their acute awareness of America's military weakness, especially its army's. The President made no military commitments at the meeting on June 25. By the next night, however, the situation in Korea had deteriorated badly. General Douglas MacArthur, the American military commander in Asia, urgently requested American help. Truman responded with more decisive steps, committing American air and naval forces to the South and greatly increasing aid to Indochina and the Philippines. He also ordered the Seventh Fleet to the waters between mainland China and Taiwan, thus guaranteeing Chiang Kaishek naval protection for the first time since his flight the previous year. Within two days of the invasion the United States was significantly expanding and militarizing its foreign policies in Asia.

The next morning Truman widened his circle of advisers a little by bringing in some congressional leaders for a meeting. But his goal was mainly to inform them of the decisions the previous night, not to seek their advice. They offered no serious objections, and the meeting lasted only half an hour. Later that day Congress seemed enthusiastic in support of the President's actions. That evening the UN passed a resolution supporting the dispatch of air and naval forces to aid the beleaguered South Koreans.

But these moves, too, failed to slow the advance from the North, and MacArthur grew ever more agitated, calling for immediate dispatch to Korea of two American army divisions from occupation duty in Japan. His plea reached the Pentagon at 3:00
A.M.
June 30, Washington time. Truman, up and shaved, received it at Blair House at 4:47 and approved it without hesitation or further consultation. His decision produced the development that virtually all American political and military leaders, MacArthur included, had dreaded until that time: United States soldiers were to fight on the land masses of Asia.

Thanks to the desperate military situation in Korea in the five days following the invasion, Truman and his advisers were acting under formidable pressures of time. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they made some mistakes. One was Truman's failure adequately to consult Congress. Neither then nor later did the President request what some people thought the Constitution demanded in such a situation: a congressional declaration of war. When he asked Senator Tom Connally, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, if he should do so, Connally said no. "If a burglar breaks into your house, you can shoot at him without going down to the police station and getting permission. You might run into a long debate by Congress, which would tie your hands completely. You have the right to do so as Commander in Chief and under the UN Charter."
¹²

Connally merely told Truman what he wanted to hear. The President did not involve Congress in the decision to intervene. He later explained, "I just had to act as Commander-in-Chief, and I did."
¹³
This was a plausible argument, for time was indeed of the essence, and he did not know then how bloody a conflict lay ahead. Still, he set a bad precedent. Presidents in the past had maneuvered in ways that committed American troops to battle. But Truman had gone farther than that, asserting that his constitutional role as commander-in-chief justified executive action alone. Many later Presidents, notably Lyndon Johnson, followed in Truman's footsteps by committing the United States to fighting without securing congressional sanction.